Pros on the Road: Sales manager aims to nix travel troubles

— -- Sue Reiss loves her job.

She is national sales manager for Impact Recovery Systems Inc., a company that makes traffic-control devices — such as pedestrian signs — equipped with a mechanism that allows them to rebound immediately if they are struck by a car. Reiss supervises employees and calls on transportation and planning departments across the country.

"I love the people I work with,'' says Reiss. "I love the industry that I'm in.''

But the trips that will keep her on the road 160 days this year? Not so much.

"The downside of my job is the travel,'' she says. "I'm kind of a homebody and I enjoy being at home.''

Of course, being a frequent traveler with top-tier status on Delta has its perks.

"My airline status actually makes the travel as painless as it can be,'' she says. "It's much less painful than (for) anyone else who may just travel infrequently. I'm loaded first. I know there's always room for my bag. I'm normally upgraded. I'm thanked regularly.''

Still, "obvously 9/11 made everything much more difficult,'' she says. "The security lines tend to be longer. The security is much more stringent. I have a knee replacement so I have to be scanned or patted down every time, so that's pretty unpleasant.''

To cope, she's assembled a series of on-the-road rituals that help her stay healthy, calm and connected to home.

First, it's nice to have a great suitcase. Reiss recently found what she calls the "perfect'' bag that holds a few days' worth of clothes and also has a compartment for her laptop, cutting out the need for a briefcase. "It makes my life so much less difficult,'' she says. "I can carry my purse and I have everything else in my bag.''

Equally important is what goes in the bag. There's a pair of slacks or a skirt with lightweight, wrinkle-resistant tops that she can mix and match. And she doesn't leave home without her vitamins. But rather than clutter her luggage with bottles, she counts out how many vitamins she'll need before the trip and packs them in 2-inch Ziploc bags. "They don't take up a lot of space,'' she says.

Once at the airport, she keeps her luggage with her.

"Typically I don't check my bag, because it costs me so much time on the other end,'' she says. "I can wait up to half an hour, going and coming. That doesn't seem like a lot, but cumulatively it amounts to quite a lot of time. The other thing is, if have a flight delay or cancellation, I always have my bag with me. It's happened before where I've gotten to a city and my bag was on the plane and I wasn't, so it's kind of an insurance policy.''

She also keeps her ID and valuables separate. A crisis that occurred during a business trip to Chicago roughly a decade ago led to that critical change in the way she traveled.

"I used to carry a shoulder bag and everything related to me was in a wallet in that bag,'' she says. "All my credit cards. My Social Security card. My checkbook, all my cash, all my ID.''

She was walking back to her car from dinner when she passed a group and got bumped. In that instant, her wallet was stolen.

"I had no means of ID. I had no cash,'' she remembers. "I had a rental car I couldn't settle. I couldn't settle my hotel room. I had nothing. I had to call my husband and ask him to take a photocopy of my passport and …fax it to my hotel. And I had to get a police report, and it took me about three hours to clear security at the airport. So since then, I don't keep everything in the same wallet or even the same bag. I have things scattered throughout my luggage so if something like this happens again, I'm not so vulnerable."

She also carries a spare credit card, but not in the same place as her cash, plus both her driver's license and passport, also in different spaces. "And I don't carry my checkbook anymore.''

If she needs to cover a lot of ground in the city she's visiting, she may rent a car — she prefers National and Alamo, which she says give her a broad selection of vehicles to choose from. And she carries her own GPS or relies on her iPhone's navigation system to help her get around. She likes a nice hotel at a bargain price and so books a room on Priceline. "If it's a four-star hotel and I normally like to spend $100 a night, that's the bid I make,'' she says. She will go for a more expensive hotel, however, if it's the base for a conference she's attending. "So if I have customers in that hotel and I'm going to walk through the bar or lobby and have a chance encounter with those people, that's a positive for me,'' she says.

Reiss prefers hotels that have a gym so she can work out, but she'll power walk if there's no exercise facility. And "I practice yoga whether I'm at home or on the road. That's a big de-stresser for me.''

She also likes a hotel with a restaurant. "If I'm entertaining that night, I'll leave the hotel,'' she says. "But if I'm not and my day is over, my aim is to go to the hotel, work out, go to the bar for a glass of wine, eat and go back to my room. I don't want to go back to my car and drive somewhere.''

Reiss also has a trick for staving off jet lag. "If I'm going from the East Coast to West Coast, or to Hawaii and back, when I'm the most likely to get jet-lagged, the way I beat it is I immediately get on that time even if I'm completely fried,'' she says. "If I get there at 7 their time, which is 11 or midnight my time, I'll stay up a couple hours, have dinner like I normally would at 7 and then go to bed. I find that helps me.''

Either way, she doesn't have to worry about oversleeping. And it's not the front desk that makes sure she's up.

"My husband (Greg) gives me my wake-up call in the morning,'' she says. "So I'm talking to him in the morning like I was at home. I make a point of doing it for both of us. He misses me. And I can have a grueling day and the last thing I want to do is talk to somebody, but if I was home I'd at least give him a brief overview of my day. So it keeps us both as normal as we can be when I'm not there.''

Reiss' travel tips:

•Count out the vitamins you need rather than packing the whole bottle.

•Don't carry your identification, cash and credit cards in the same place.

•Immediately get on local time to help beat jet lag.

•Pack clothes that aren't prone to wrinkling.